Perry's Texas.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist - Rick Perry

The corporate media is going gaga over yet another small-minded, rightwing Texas governor.

When Rick Perry launched his candidacy at a Prayer-A-Palooza in Houston, the fawning reporters should have instead slipped away to the city's convention center. There, 100,000 Houstonians had gathered in bleak testimony to his gubernatorial leadership. They were some of Houston's many low-income children and parents who are struggling to make ends meet in Perry's Texas.

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These needy families had come to a back-to-school event where school supplies, uniforms, haircut vouchers, immunizations, and bags of food were being provided. Officials had expected 25,000 people to show up, but four times that number came. Some families had camped out for hours before the doors opened, and many were turned away, as supplies were exhausted by 10 a.m. "It shows the need," observed a solemn school spokesman.

Perry is known in Texas as "Governor Supercuts," not only for his spiffy hairdo, but also for cutting the budgets of schools and poverty programs and holding down wages. In his ten-year tenure, Perry's Texas has created more minimum wage jobs--really nothing more than jobettes--than any other state, and his super-rich state now has more families in poverty and without health coverage than any other.

The Miracle Man has dug Texas into one of the deepest budget holes in the country: $27 billion short of the money needed to cover the same miserly level of state services Texans now get. This is the guy who vows to bring his "Texas Miracle" to the nation as President Supercuts.

With Perry, you get, the two basic strands of todays Republican Party in one suit. On the one hand, he has carefully situated himself on the farthest rim of the tea party. Think Michele Bachmann with better hair.

Perry called the BP oil disaster an "act of God."

His response to the drought that's devastating Texas was to pray for rain (God did not oblige).

He's a "tenther" who angrily asserts state's rights to nullify Obama's "socialist" schemes (until he needed federal cash to fix his state's bankrupt unemployment fund).

He hates government-financed health care (except...